Summary: As an Enterprise Storage as a Service vendor, we built our Virtual Private Storage Array technology from the ground up for the cloud, and OpenStack has been a key component of our architecture from day one. As we head to the OpenStack Summit 2014 in Atlanta (Zadara Storage will be exhibiting in Booth #E16) our CEO Nelson Nahum shares some of the reasons why we chose to base our architecture on OpenStack.
The First Storage Company to Join OpenStack
Zadara Storage was the first storage company to join the OpenStack community, in early 2011. In fact, part of our award-winning Virtual Private Storage Array (VPSA) technology that delivers on-demand, flexible, elastic SAN and NAS, is based on OpenStack and enables OpenStack and other clouds to run storage with true enterprise readiness, including high-performance storage, native NFS/CIFS support, advanced data management features, HA, encryption, RAID protection, and more.
With OpenStack Summit around the corner, we wanted to celebrate OpenStack, its community and technology ecosystem – it’s incredible to have watched this community explode in these very few years! Here are some of the reasons why we chose OpenStack to serve as part of our underlying technology, and why we think OpenStack is here to stay:
1. Open Source and Open Community – OpenStack is here to stay
For any new company, whether a startup or a service provider, the ability to tap into a knowledge-base of open source allows one to leapfrog directly into building out new technology by using existing, abundant, rich resources. This certainly was the case with our Virtual Private Storage Array technology. We’ve taken existing OpenStack elements, improved them, shared them with the community, and brought them together with other platforms, file systems and our Zadara special sauce, to augment OpenStack with specific Enterprise-grade storage capabilities that deliver truly robust, feature-rich elastic SAN and NAS.
The OpenStack community is rapidly growing and has seen major players such as IBM, Dell, HP, and Cisco join its ranks. The growing number of contributors ensures this technology sees – and will continue to see – frequent updates, developments and improvements to make it an even better platform.
2. OpenStack is Modular – Build the Cloud YOU Need
Whether it is compute, networking, storage or VM image service, OpenStack is a modular platform with great intercompatibility. For Zadara, this enabled us to take only the OpenStack components we needed, and the ability to embed them within our own software and technology stack to build a unique storage cloud solution.
3. Reliability
When we started working with OpenStack, our engineers did the most rigorous and strenuous testing. Honestly, even we were surprised at how stable the code is! OpenStack is an incredibly reliable platform, and this feature was a great consideration in building our technology.
The main challenge in developing a true enterprise-grade solution was not in OpenStack reliability, but rather in the added feature sets we needed to provide, including snapshot and clone capabilities, high performance of both networking and storage, file protocols, clustering for HA, encryption, remote replication, and more. The combination of the reliability of the OpenStack architecture with our added storage features, data management capabilities and independently developed software allows us to run a global infrastructure at data centers across multiple continents and multiple cloud architectures, and to manage the entire infrastructure from a single location.
At the OpenStack Summit we will demonstrate bi-directional replication across regions and cloud providers. Full demo session info at the end of this post, and you can learn more about VPSA replication features here.
4. Vendor and Hardware Agnosticism – Your Ticket to Freedom and Cost Reduction
To provide customers with flexibility and the most cost-effective solution, we built our architecture to be both hardware and vendor agnostic. OpenStack’s platform enables us to ensure our customers can access to enterprise-grade storage while taking advantage of lower-cost commodity hardware and the cloud’s as-a-service model, everywhere: on-premise or off-premise, at colocation facilities and in leading service providers and locations across the globe (including the US, Singapore, Zurich, Sydney, Japan and more).
5. Scalability – Tackling Big, Big Data
Using OpenStack’s hyperscale capabilities, VPSA is engineered for Exabyte-scale needs, helping service providers deliver enterprise-grade storage, enabling companies meet big-data demands in the cloud, and empowering enterprises to replace their traditional storage silos with flexible, on-demand storage for all of their primary and secondary storage needs.
So where do Zadara’s VPSA and OpenStack overlap?
OpenStack
- Resource Management
- Evolving Cloud Ecosystem
- Cloud Scale
- Resource Metering + Chargeback
- Automation
- SDDC
Zadara VPSA
- Consistent QoS
- Advanced Data Management Features
- Control + Privacy
- Flexibility + Elasticity
- Pure OpEx business model
Zadara Storage at OpenStack Summit!
Join us in Booth #E16 and in the Demo Theater
Visit us in booth E16! You can set up a meeting with one of our executives by contacting us here or stop by and say hello.
Demonstrating replication across clouds and regions
Join our VP of engineering Vladimir Popovski in the Demo Theater, Wednesday, May 14 at 10:45am – 11:00am, where he will be demonstrating bi-directional replication across multiple cloud providers and US regions: Demo Theater Session info here
Learn More
You can learn more about Zadara’s OpenStack architecture in the presentation below:
‘Building Software Defined Storage Cloud Using OpenStack’
or listen to my recent interview with Shlomo Swidler about OpenStack, cloud storage and enterprise readiness, in prep for the summit in Israel:
